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One of the things that's amenable to scientific study is how we communicate information about science. Science education should, in theory at least, produce a scientifically literate public and prepare those most interested in the topic for advanced studies in their chosen field. That clearly hasn't worked out, so people have subjected science education itself to the scientific method.

What they've found is that an approach called active learning (also called active instruction) consistently produces the best results. This involves pushing students to work through problems and reason things out as an inherent part of the learning process.

Even though the science on that is clear, most college professors have remained committed to approaching class time as a lecture. In fact, a large number of instructors who try active learning end up going back to the standard lecture, and one of the reasons they cite is that the students prefer it that way. This sounds a bit like excuse making, so a group of instructors decided to test this belief using physics students. And it turns out professors weren't making an excuse. Even as understanding improved with active learning, the students felt they got more out of a traditional lecture.

Testing education

One of the challenges of tracking this sort of thing is that every class will have a different range of talents, and some instructors will simply have been better at teaching. Figuring out how to control for this variability is essential if you want to understand the impact of teaching methods. Fortunately, the Harvard team came up with a clever way of doing so.

They essentially split a physics class in two. One half would get a standard lecture. The person teaching the other half would use the same slides and class materials but lead these students through an active learning process during the class. Then, two weeks later, the two groups of students would swap places; the first would now have an active learning class on a different physics topic, and the second would receive a standard lecture. That way, the same students experience both regular lectures and active learning, and the instructors would bring any talents they had to both approaches.

After each class, the students were surveyed about the experience, and they took a short quiz to determine how well they understood the subject of the class. The whole thing was done for both the spring and fall semesters of a class to provide a larger sample size.

As expected from past studies, the students in the active learning classes consistently outperformed their peers (and themselves), scoring a half a standard deviation higher on the quizzes.

Enlarge/ While students learned more with active instruction (left), every measure of satisfaction was lower.

But based on the surveys, the students would have been surprised to find out that's the case. The students found the active learning classroom to lack a bit of coherence, and it suffered from the frequent interruptions, which made the experience frustrating and confusing. When asked how much they felt they learned, students in the active learning classroom consistently rated themselves as having learned less—the exact opposite of what the quizzes indicate. The students also indicated that they would prefer that all their future classes be standard lectures.

Explanations abound

So why is an extremely effective way of teaching so unpopular? The researchers come up with a number of potential explanations. One is simply that active learning is hard. "Students in the actively taught groups had to struggle with their peers through difficult physics problems that they initially did not know how to solve," the authors acknowledge. That's a big contrast with the standard lecture which, being the standard, is familiar to the students. A talented instructor can also make their lecture material feel like it's a straight-forward, coherent packet of information. This can lead students to over-rate their familiarity with the topic.

The other issue the authors suggest may be going on here is conceptually similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people who don't understand a topic are unable to accurately evaluate how much they knew. Consistent with this, the researchers identified the students with the strongest backgrounds in physics, finding that they tended to be more accurate in assessing what they got out of each class.

Whatever the cause, it's not ideal to have students dislike the most effective method of teaching them. So, the authors suggest that professors who are considering adopting active learning take the time to prepare a little lecture on it. The researchers prepared one that described the active learning process and provided some evidence of its effectiveness. The introduction acknowledged the evidence described above—namely, that the students might not feel like they were getting as much out of the class.

In part thanks to this short addition to the class, by the end of the semester, 65% of the students reported feeling positive toward active learning. That's still not exactly overwhelming enthusiasm, but it might be enough to keep instructors from giving up on an extremely effective teaching technique.

185 Reader Comments

A lot of my education was "active," particularly in college. Many classes were lecture classes but required me to simultaneously take associated lab classes or seminars. (The latter two being "active.")

Did other people have different experiences?

I don't know why this would or should be changed. We can't get rid of lectures and books entirely... at some point, somebody is going to have to explain how to do the thing you're being asked to do.

EDIT: Also I forgot homework assignments, which are "active." Not like homework is anything new or revolutionary.

No they aren't. Active learning involves direct supervision and guidance. In point of fact, homework has failed to demonstrate any real measurable benefits to learning outcomes. About the only thing it's proven to do is drive stress levels for students to stratospheric levels when every teacher feels your only activity each evening is the one they've assigned you.

A lot of my education was "active," particularly in college. Many classes were lecture classes but required me to simultaneously take associated lab classes or seminars. (The latter two being "active.")

Did other people have different experiences?

I don't know why this would or should be changed. We can't get rid of lectures and books entirely... at some point, somebody is going to have to explain how to do the thing you're being asked to do.

EDIT: Also I forgot homework assignments, which are "active." Not like homework is anything new or revolutionary.

If labs qualify as active learning, nearly half my classes as an undergrad would then be classified as having been "active".

A lot of my education was "active," particularly in college. Many classes were lecture classes but required me to simultaneously take associated lab classes or seminars. (The latter two being "active.")

Did other people have different experiences?

I don't know why this would or should be changed. We can't get rid of lectures and books entirely... at some point, somebody is going to have to explain how to do the thing you're being asked to do.

EDIT: Also I forgot homework assignments, which are "active." Not like homework is anything new or revolutionary.

No they aren't. Active learning involves direct supervision and guidance. In point of fact, homework has failed to demonstrate any real measurable benefits to learning outcomes. About the only thing it's proven to do is drive stress levels for students to stratospheric levels when every teacher feels your only activity each evening is the one they've assigned you.

And therein lie my war stories. Literature courses expecting me to get through a book an evening, meanwhile CS courses expecting me to write and annotate a chunk of code demonstrating the concepts taught that day in terms of an implementation for a fictional business... which I must also write a business plan for. And a few 3 page essays (they seem to think that smaller means faster to write)... all the while attending my evening lab because the daytime one conflicted with my other courses.

So, I'm a teacher, and here's my take on it. Learning that requires more student activity than reading, answering questions, and taking notes on a canned lecture is hard as fuck. I teach History and it takes 10 to 15 times as long to design and research and grade an active experience vs. a passive one.

I have a lesson that is pretty damn near perfect . Start with a bellwork; students have to write a short what if piece wondering why people do ___. Then we watch a clip from an animated movie, and talk about what makes the people in the movie do ___. Then we take real Historical data, graph it, and draw conclusions about what happened to population in the 1800s, how it grew, how it moved. This took me 12 hours of uninterrupted planning time to make, with no distractions. Some of similar quality have taken me up to a week to design, working 10 hours a day.

My coworkers rightfully think I'm crazy. I can't not plan like that, it's a compulsion. I do two or three of these lessons a year. If I keep teaching my subject (I haven't and won't) for 30 years, optimistically I will have made half a year's worth of lessons like this. Of which 20% or so might become outdated. Realistically, printing and assembling prewritten materials for some lessons can take up a full two hours.

I'm not saying this to whine and moan. I think people need to understand how systematically screwed up education is in our country, and how it represents a complete failure of Federalism. Realistically, a team of three good teachers per subject per grade level could assemble, including writing, the materials needed for the entire country in two or three years. We're talking about 156 people at a paltry cost around $20 million. Throw in graphic designers for each two teams, and the cost goes up by another $4 million. The textbook industry is several billion dollars, and open source textbooks routinely do a better job, especially in History. Teachers pay Teachers is huge among my coworkers, but there's objective measure of quality there either. One tiny federally funded initiative to make good content could destroy an industry of rent-seekers and political manipulators.

So instead of active lessons, students get canned lectures, lessons that were good twenty years ago, etc. And that's the only thing they know. That's what they learn to expect and measure quality from. We went over what students would expect a perfect class to be like before school started, and 75%+ said it would be quiet. A quiet classroom is probably not an active one.

Thank you. Period. Full stop. I wish every teacher would put in that kind of effort - and I wish they were all properly rewarded for it.

Yup. K-12 teachers, starting out, should be on pay parity with roughly a GS-10 on the federal pay scale, with appropriate locality adjustment and a roughly similar schedule of pay increases for experience and COLA. That's $50-60k a year to start, in other words, and someone with 6-8 years of experience and a masters would be in the $78-80k range.

That still barely compensates them fairly, because the amount of overtime teachers put in is staggering, especially in the first few years of their careers.

Well, teachers in my area are being paid fairly, at least at the beginning, according to your scale. They don't get the major steps up in pay though, at least not as fast as you suggest.

In fairness, I'm in a state that - while otherwise generally progressive! - has some of the worst teacher pay in the country. A teacher friend of ours in her second year of teaching hasn't even cracked $50k.

A lot of my education was "active," particularly in college. Many classes were lecture classes but required me to simultaneously take associated lab classes or seminars. (The latter two being "active.")

Did other people have different experiences?

I don't know why this would or should be changed. We can't get rid of lectures and books entirely... at some point, somebody is going to have to explain how to do the thing you're being asked to do.

EDIT: Also I forgot homework assignments, which are "active." Not like homework is anything new or revolutionary.

No they aren't. Active learning involves direct supervision and guidance. In point of fact, homework has failed to demonstrate any real measurable benefits to learning outcomes. About the only thing it's proven to do is drive stress levels for students to stratospheric levels when every teacher feels your only activity each evening is the one they've assigned you.

This is as close as the article gets to defining active learning:

"This involves pushing students to work through problems and reason things out as an inherent part of the learning process."

So homework would indeed qualify.

But if you think active learning requires supervision and guidance, then lab classes and seminars still qualify. Or at least the lab classes and seminars that I attended all had supervision and guidance.

So I don't know why this is a big deal or even being discussed at all. Active learning has been built into education for decades, if not centuries.

First, some great articles. The second one seems particularly helpful, particularly this bit:

Quote:

What good teachers understand, experts say, is that the different senses each have their own strengths and weaknesses. “We’re all visual learners,” Boser said. “Our vision is the best system to take in data.” Likewise, we’re all auditory learners -- when the material calls for it. Consider the advantages of hearing a story via audiobook: sequential information is ideal for this “style” of learning. But “auditory learners” who want to get better at soccer still lace up their cleats, run onto the field and practice their moves, Boser said. “You would never just listen to podcasts all day.”

Different disciplines require different strategies for building a mental model that can be effectively used.

Thanks for correcting me; I'm obviously not a cognitive psychologist, or an educator in even the loosest of senses (that may change when I have to train new developers...eventually). I think that what you've provided in those articles - that different people find better return on investment using different learning strategies for different disciplines - is perhaps a more precise of a way to frame the learning situation than cleaving to the "Learning styles" cognitive myth.

Thank you for giving me information, with which I was able to challenge some of my long-held preconceptions.

EDIT: That also explains the periodic posts earlier in the thread that were some variation of, "Asvarduil! Learning styles aren't real!" To forestall any more of those, I added an edit linking to your post, saying that I get the point now.

... I think that what you've provided in those articles - that different people find better return on investment using different learning strategies for different disciplines - is perhaps a more precise of a way to frame the learning situation than cleaving to the "Learning styles" cognitive myth. ...

Only tangentially related, but a lot of people claim that they can study and work better when they're listening to music. Always struck me as very dubious since I personally have such a hard time concentrating on anything when music is playing. A few years ago I saw that a study was done that showed that nobody can study or work better when they're listening to music. Seems about as logical as the idea that everybody basically learns the same. Personally I find it very refreshing when these ideas that sound kind of stupid turn out to be actually stupid.

... I think that what you've provided in those articles - that different people find better return on investment using different learning strategies for different disciplines - is perhaps a more precise of a way to frame the learning situation than cleaving to the "Learning styles" cognitive myth. ...

Only tangentially related, but a lot of people claim that they can study and work better when they're listening to music. Always struck me as very dubious since I personally have such a hard time concentrating on anything when music is playing. A few years ago I saw that a study was done that showed that nobody can study or work better when they're listening to music. Seems about as logical as the idea that everybody basically learns the same. Personally I find it very refreshing when these ideas that sound kind of stupid turn out to be actually stupid.

Maybe it works if you threaten to play boy bands and bubblegum pop on and endless loop. You want to escape Beiber? Learn that material!!!

So, I'm a teacher, and here's my take on it. Learning that requires more student activity than reading, answering questions, and taking notes on a canned lecture is hard as fuck. I teach History and it takes 10 to 15 times as long to design and research and grade an active experience vs. a passive one.

I have a lesson that is pretty damn near perfect . Start with a bellwork; students have to write a short what if piece wondering why people do ___. Then we watch a clip from an animated movie, and talk about what makes the people in the movie do ___. Then we take real Historical data, graph it, and draw conclusions about what happened to population in the 1800s, how it grew, how it moved. This took me 12 hours of uninterrupted planning time to make, with no distractions. Some of similar quality have taken me up to a week to design, working 10 hours a day.

My coworkers rightfully think I'm crazy. I can't not plan like that, it's a compulsion. I do two or three of these lessons a year. If I keep teaching my subject (I haven't and won't) for 30 years, optimistically I will have made half a year's worth of lessons like this. Of which 20% or so might become outdated. Realistically, printing and assembling prewritten materials for some lessons can take up a full two hours.

I'm not saying this to whine and moan. I think people need to understand how systematically screwed up education is in our country, and how it represents a complete failure of Federalism. Realistically, a team of three good teachers per subject per grade level could assemble, including writing, the materials needed for the entire country in two or three years. We're talking about 156 people at a paltry cost around $20 million. Throw in graphic designers for each two teams, and the cost goes up by another $4 million. The textbook industry is several billion dollars, and open source textbooks routinely do a better job, especially in History. Teachers pay Teachers is huge among my coworkers, but there's objective measure of quality there either. One tiny federally funded initiative to make good content could destroy an industry of rent-seekers and political manipulators.

So instead of active lessons, students get canned lectures, lessons that were good twenty years ago, etc. And that's the only thing they know. That's what they learn to expect and measure quality from. We went over what students would expect a perfect class to be like before school started, and 75%+ said it would be quiet. A quiet classroom is probably not an active one.

Thank you. Period. Full stop. I wish every teacher would put in that kind of effort - and I wish they were all properly rewarded for it.

Yup. K-12 teachers, starting out, should be on pay parity with roughly a GS-10 on the federal pay scale, with appropriate locality adjustment and a roughly similar schedule of pay increases for experience and COLA. That's $50-60k a year to start, in other words, and someone with 6-8 years of experience and a masters would be in the $78-80k range.

That still barely compensates them fairly, because the amount of overtime teachers put in is staggering, especially in the first few years of their careers.

Well, teachers in my area are being paid fairly, at least at the beginning, according to your scale. They don't get the major steps up in pay though, at least not as fast as you suggest.

In fairness, I'm in a state that - while otherwise generally progressive! - has some of the worst teacher pay in the country. A teacher friend of ours in her second year of teaching hasn't even cracked $50k.

Note I did state my area (not state) and I don't know that it holds true for the entire area, but certainly for the few districts surrounding mine.

Couldn't it simply be that through active learning the knowledge is recorded with a less conscious effort from the student, thus both leading to better grades but also to this false feeling of "having learned less".They learned more, but since it was without a conscious effort on their part... they don't realize it.

Sometimes I don't want to sit through some kind of directed active learning exercise. Sometimes I want to sit there with my brain on autopilot taking notes while I worry about the details of real life, or space out, or whatever.

Consistently having to power your way mentally through every lecture class every day and be actively engaged for 3, maybe 4 90-minute classes in a row—each of which involve new concepts in unrelated disciplines that may stretch from math through the humanities—just sounds fucking exhausting.

Save the active learning exercises for the moments when an actual knowledge explosion about a topic is truly worthwhile or illuminating—like when exploring a hugely important new fundamental. For the rest, let me sit through a lecture and/or study on my own time.

You have a very good point actually.

However, I don't think that means we should sacrifice some active learning in exchange for some less effective education if being tired is the reason. Sitting through a lecture won't refresh you as much as relaxing in a cafe, playing some games, or taking a nap either anyways.

Perhaps instead, education should be structured so students have less classes per day, or the classes are more spaced out throughout the day so that you have some in the morning, some in the evening, or just having the same amount of classes but only an hour long instead of 90 minutes, that way you don't burn out on active learning and in some cases even have a chance to give your brain a complete break before starting again.

This sounds like an athlete who says, "Man, this fucking training is hard. I don't want to do this rigorous stuff four days a week; it's too exhausting." Of course, that athlete will be the lesser performer than the athlete who sucks it up and trains like hell, exhaustion be damned.

Your analogy would apply to me if I was training to be a career student.

This is perhaps the first scientific quantification of a much broader effect in how today's students approach their education. It's great if we can get Active Learning to be more accepted, but a much larger nut to crack is figuring out how to get students re-engaged in their own higher ed, and to ENJOY the process of learning, rather than just expecting to consume content.

There's a tremendous disconnect between the actual purpose of a university education and the unstated but de-facto purpose of a university education.

The actual purpose of a university education is to equip a student with critical thinking skills by immersing them in a wide variety of disciplines and focused study.

The de-facto purpose is for university to work like a trade school. And people get hella angry when it doesn't work out that way.

A university is not going to teach you how to do a job. If you want to learn how to do a job, apprentice yourself to a craftsman or go to a vocational school. College is there to teach you how to learn, not how to work. A student who's trying to get the most out of their university education needs to have their expectations appropriately set on what college will and won't teach them.

(The fact that you often can't get considered for an entry-level job without at least one undergraduate degree isn't helping at all—and in fact has contributed to the de facto "college is for learning how to do a job" thing.)

That may be all you get out of a university education in a liberal arts degree, but quite a few of us got degrees where we actually need to know things in addition to being skilled problem solvers and critical thinkers. The content of foundational classes like Physics, Thermodynamics, Circuit Analysis, Digital Logic, Fluid Dynamics, etc. need to be understood and remembered.

This is perhaps the first scientific quantification of a much broader effect in how today's students approach their education. It's great if we can get Active Learning to be more accepted, but a much larger nut to crack is figuring out how to get students re-engaged in their own higher ed, and to ENJOY the process of learning, rather than just expecting to consume content.

There's a tremendous disconnect between the actual purpose of a university education and the unstated but de-facto purpose of a university education.

The actual purpose of a university education is to equip a student with critical thinking skills by immersing them in a wide variety of disciplines and focused study.

The de-facto purpose is for university to work like a trade school. And people get hella angry when it doesn't work out that way.

A university is not going to teach you how to do a job. If you want to learn how to do a job, apprentice yourself to a craftsman or go to a vocational school. College is there to teach you how to learn, not how to work. A student who's trying to get the most out of their university education needs to have their expectations appropriately set on what college will and won't teach them.

(The fact that you often can't get considered for an entry-level job without at least one undergraduate degree isn't helping at all—and in fact has contributed to the de facto "college is for learning how to do a job" thing.)

That may be all you get out of a university education in a liberal arts degree, but quite a few of us got degrees where we actually need to know things in addition to being skilled problem solvers and critical thinkers. The content of foundational classes like Physics, Thermodynamics, Circuit Analysis, Digital Logic, Fluid Dynamics, etc. need to be understood and remembered.

Only if you get a job that exercises those skills. I know quite a few that went into "engineering" jobs where all they did was use lookup tables, e.g., for lighting and airflow/capacities for buildings. Very little actual engineering knowledge was required. Several of these friends decades later have barely used algebra in their jobs.

This is perhaps the first scientific quantification of a much broader effect in how today's students approach their education. It's great if we can get Active Learning to be more accepted, but a much larger nut to crack is figuring out how to get students re-engaged in their own higher ed, and to ENJOY the process of learning, rather than just expecting to consume content.

There's a tremendous disconnect between the actual purpose of a university education and the unstated but de-facto purpose of a university education.

The actual purpose of a university education is to equip a student with critical thinking skills by immersing them in a wide variety of disciplines and focused study.

The de-facto purpose is for university to work like a trade school. And people get hella angry when it doesn't work out that way.

A university is not going to teach you how to do a job. If you want to learn how to do a job, apprentice yourself to a craftsman or go to a vocational school. College is there to teach you how to learn, not how to work. A student who's trying to get the most out of their university education needs to have their expectations appropriately set on what college will and won't teach them.

(The fact that you often can't get considered for an entry-level job without at least one undergraduate degree isn't helping at all—and in fact has contributed to the de facto "college is for learning how to do a job" thing.)

That may be all you get out of a university education in a liberal arts degree, but quite a few of us got degrees where we actually need to know things in addition to being skilled problem solvers and critical thinkers. The content of foundational classes like Physics, Thermodynamics, Circuit Analysis, Digital Logic, Fluid Dynamics, etc. need to be understood and remembered.

Only if you get a job that exercises those skills. I know quite a few that went into "engineering" jobs where all they did was use lookup tables, e.g., for lighting and airflow/capacities for buildings. Very little actual engineering knowledge was required. Several of these friends decades later have barely used algebra in their jobs.

I guess you could hope a job comes along that requires an engineering degree but no actual engineering skills. Technical sales is probably what you are looking for. But, good luck finishing the degree in the first place if you didn't get the fundamentals down before your upper division classes.

This is perhaps the first scientific quantification of a much broader effect in how today's students approach their education. It's great if we can get Active Learning to be more accepted, but a much larger nut to crack is figuring out how to get students re-engaged in their own higher ed, and to ENJOY the process of learning, rather than just expecting to consume content.

There's a tremendous disconnect between the actual purpose of a university education and the unstated but de-facto purpose of a university education.

The actual purpose of a university education is to equip a student with critical thinking skills by immersing them in a wide variety of disciplines and focused study.

The de-facto purpose is for university to work like a trade school. And people get hella angry when it doesn't work out that way.

A university is not going to teach you how to do a job. If you want to learn how to do a job, apprentice yourself to a craftsman or go to a vocational school. College is there to teach you how to learn, not how to work. A student who's trying to get the most out of their university education needs to have their expectations appropriately set on what college will and won't teach them.

(The fact that you often can't get considered for an entry-level job without at least one undergraduate degree isn't helping at all—and in fact has contributed to the de facto "college is for learning how to do a job" thing.)

That may be all you get out of a university education in a liberal arts degree, but quite a few of us got degrees where we actually need to know things in addition to being skilled problem solvers and critical thinkers. The content of foundational classes like Physics, Thermodynamics, Circuit Analysis, Digital Logic, Fluid Dynamics, etc. need to be understood and remembered.

Only if you get a job that exercises those skills. I know quite a few that went into "engineering" jobs where all they did was use lookup tables, e.g., for lighting and airflow/capacities for buildings. Very little actual engineering knowledge was required. Several of these friends decades later have barely used algebra in their jobs.

I am not convinced that engineering positions that do not require actual engineering skills are particularly thick on the ground.

This is perhaps the first scientific quantification of a much broader effect in how today's students approach their education. It's great if we can get Active Learning to be more accepted, but a much larger nut to crack is figuring out how to get students re-engaged in their own higher ed, and to ENJOY the process of learning, rather than just expecting to consume content.

There's a tremendous disconnect between the actual purpose of a university education and the unstated but de-facto purpose of a university education.

The actual purpose of a university education is to equip a student with critical thinking skills by immersing them in a wide variety of disciplines and focused study.

The de-facto purpose is for university to work like a trade school. And people get hella angry when it doesn't work out that way.

A university is not going to teach you how to do a job. If you want to learn how to do a job, apprentice yourself to a craftsman or go to a vocational school. College is there to teach you how to learn, not how to work. A student who's trying to get the most out of their university education needs to have their expectations appropriately set on what college will and won't teach them.

(The fact that you often can't get considered for an entry-level job without at least one undergraduate degree isn't helping at all—and in fact has contributed to the de facto "college is for learning how to do a job" thing.)

That may be all you get out of a university education in a liberal arts degree, but quite a few of us got degrees where we actually need to know things in addition to being skilled problem solvers and critical thinkers. The content of foundational classes like Physics, Thermodynamics, Circuit Analysis, Digital Logic, Fluid Dynamics, etc. need to be understood and remembered.

Only if you get a job that exercises those skills. I know quite a few that went into "engineering" jobs where all they did was use lookup tables, e.g., for lighting and airflow/capacities for buildings. Very little actual engineering knowledge was required. Several of these friends decades later have barely used algebra in their jobs.

I guess you could hope a job comes along that requires an engineering degree but no actual engineering skills. Technical sales is probably what you are looking for. But, good luck finishing the degree in the first place if you didn't get the fundamentals down before your upper division classes.

Not at all the message I was going for - my point was that actual jobs that utilize the degree are few.

That may be all you get out of a university education in a liberal arts degree, but quite a few of us got degrees where we actually need to know things in addition to being skilled problem solvers and critical thinkers. The content of foundational classes like Physics, Thermodynamics, Circuit Analysis, Digital Logic, Fluid Dynamics, etc. need to be understood and remembered.

Only if you get a job that exercises those skills. I know quite a few that went into "engineering" jobs where all they did was use lookup tables, e.g., for lighting and airflow/capacities for buildings. Very little actual engineering knowledge was required. Several of these friends decades later have barely used algebra in their jobs.

I am not convinced that engineering positions that do not require actual engineering skills are particularly thick on the ground.

Today, I don't know. At the time, pretty much half of entry level engineering related jobs were misleading at best. All those jobs related to civil engineering? Pretty much table lookups and later pretty much cad sketches of the layout and the program did all the calculations for you (I know this because I wrote one of the programs to do exactly this for a client) A whole bunch of others, like you stated, wound up being sales related jobs. Another group were mostly overseeing factory lines, a glorified technical gopher. These are jobs I personally was interviewed for, worked with, or have second hand knowledge of via my group of friends who were all engineers of multiple types (CE/ME/PE/AE/EE)

Now, you can argue that you needed the technical background for several of these jobs, but the point is that you don't use a lot of the skills you developed in school in support of those jobs. For instance, how many engineers used multi-variable calculus in their jobs? How many work with Navier-Stokes equations? How many work with vibration modeling or crack propagation? Or any of the thermodynamics equations? (I've done at least 3 of those, but as I've said elsewhere, I was lucky in that my initial career actually used my degrees)

My experience it's not really that students hate active learning, it's that professors don't do a great job of providing support for it. If a student is stuck don't sit there and ask them questions over and over again going around in circles instead of just simply answering the question.

Don't just tell us the topic, hand us an assignment that's due at the end for points, and then go "Okay work through it!" especially when you are punished for how fast or slow you go. I have ADHD so I already struggle with the pace of information and classes, it doesn't help to be punished for taking longer than some peers to learn the material (often these assignments are group ones so classmates are also punished for me taking longer or vice versa). For me this is highlighted pretty clearly with active learning. I do feel like you get a better understanding of it though. It was the only way I could learn calculus. I see it's value, but the way it's often practiced is the problem.

A better approach would be to do a basic outline of the material, nothing deep just shallow. Then do active learning assignments to practice the concepts before you have to do any real graded work. Be there for support, answering questions, and making sure professors aren't critical either. The times I had this kind of support and non-judgment it worked just fine. Active learning was only hard for me when it was done in such a lazy manner or when there was very little support if you weren't getting it.

Sometimes I don't want to sit through some kind of directed active learning exercise. Sometimes I want to sit there with my brain on autopilot taking notes while I worry about the details of real life, or space out, or whatever.

Consistently having to power your way mentally through every lecture class every day and be actively engaged for 3, maybe 4 90-minute classes in a row—each of which involve new concepts in unrelated disciplines that may stretch from math through the humanities—just sounds fucking exhausting.

Save the active learning exercises for the moments when an actual knowledge explosion about a topic is truly worthwhile or illuminating—like when exploring a hugely important new fundamental. For the rest, let me sit through a lecture and/or study on my own time.

This sounds like an athlete who says, "Man, this fucking training is hard. I don't want to do this rigorous stuff four days a week; it's too exhausting." Of course, that athlete will be the lesser performer than the athlete who sucks it up and trains like hell, exhaustion be damned.

Plenty of research around productivity that employees have about 2-3 hours per day of total productivity. Most of their time at work is "wasted" in a recuperating state. When learning new things, reduce that by a factor.

If you plan on a "Dense" transfer of knowledge, I wouldn't be surprised if a human is limited to about 1 hour a day of learning.

And don't forget about the standard deviation of learning rates over time. Using the "10,000 hours to mastery" as a starting point, the standard deviation within the normal population is about 1 magnitude for simple things. The "average" person may take 10,000 hours, but really the average does not exist and you mostly get some people taking 1,000 hours and others taking 100,000 hours.

It gets worse for more mentally demanding domains. The standard deviation is about 2 magnitudes. Again, still about 10,000 hours average. But some people take 100 hours and other take 1,000,000 hours.

I understand that comparing mastery to learning the basics is not a good comparison, but it is a starting point in the hugely wide range of learning rates for different people for different domains.

Sometimes I don't want to sit through some kind of directed active learning exercise. Sometimes I want to sit there with my brain on autopilot taking notes while I worry about the details of real life, or space out, or whatever.

Consistently having to power your way mentally through every lecture class every day and be actively engaged for 3, maybe 4 90-minute classes in a row—each of which involve new concepts in unrelated disciplines that may stretch from math through the humanities—just sounds fucking exhausting.

Save the active learning exercises for the moments when an actual knowledge explosion about a topic is truly worthwhile or illuminating—like when exploring a hugely important new fundamental. For the rest, let me sit through a lecture and/or study on my own time.

In college, you don't have to go to class. You're an adult, nobody is making you go. If you you're busy or exhausted and you can't make it, that's fine. You can skip it. But reducing the effectiveness of the teaching methods to make the class more tolerable for people who don't want to be there and aren't going to pay attention anyway doesn't make any sense.

Spoken like a true _not adult_...

In college, you're* paying for every credit hour. Only an immature fool would pay the premium to take a college course, and then skip it because they were busy or exhausted.

Did I value every class I took equally? Absolutely not. Did I do the absolute bare minimum in some classes to get by? Sure. And honestly, I wasn't the most mature 19-year old on the campus, and I probably blew more than a few off to shoot pool or hang out. That doesn't change the fact that the school was collecting a fortune off me for being there...

*Or someone. You're comments make me think either you're not old enough for college, elected not to go to college, or had someone else pay for your college.

I don't think you understood the point I was trying to make."In college, you're* paying for every credit hour."That is exactly why classes should be taught as effectively as possible. My comment was a reply to Lee's comment, where he said he would rather have lecture classes than engaging classes so that he could zone out if he wanted to. My point was that college classes should be taught with the most effective methods available, not watered down so people can zone out. If you want to zone out in class, just skip class, don't require the class to be boring enough to zone out in.

I could say that there is no need to reinvent the wheel except that learning approach harks back to sensible curriculum development, something missing from 20yrs of ed-reform. Teaching approach is a guided approach to understanding the application of content as it is learned.